OVERVIEW
The specific characteristics of biomedical and clinical text motivate the need to develop specialised NLP and text mining methods, or to adapt or reengineer existing tools. Most such techniques will be reliant on access to one or more resources that provide information about domain-specific language usage, thus highlighting their central role. Accordingly, it is important to provide fora in which the current state of the art of such resources, as well as the NLP and text mining tools that make use of them, can be evaluated and discussed.

Since 2008, the biennial Workshops on Building and Evaluating Resources for Biomedical Text Mining have allowed dissemination of current developments in the field, and have provided the opportunity to discuss current problems, ideas, questions and open issues, and to understand current and potential uses of resources.

The fifth workshop in this series (BioTxtM 2016) will once again aim to bring together researchers who have developed or evaluated NLP tools and resources for biomedical or clinical applications (e.g., text mining, multilingual search, machine translation, information extraction, question-answering), as well as domain experts/health professionals who use or would benefit from the use of such resources and tools. By complementing traditional presentations with a focussed discussion session and, for the first time, a shared task sessions, the workshop aims to stimulate novel research efforts and collaborations between researchers and professionals with complementary knowledge and skills. We particularly welcome submissions that handle languages other than English, or which facilitate multilingual access to information.

TOPICS OF INTEREST
We invite papers reporting on tools and resources that support the application of NLP and text mining to various textual biomedical and clinical information sources in different languages. The workshop will focus on the resources themselves, as well as on issues relating to their usability (e.g., design guidelines, standards for building resources, storage and exchange formats, interoperability issues, evaluation, etc.) and on the different ways in which they are being employed by applications and tools to facilitate information access.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- NLP and text mining tools for biomedical or clinical applications
- Design and construction of biomedical and clinical resources for various languages: controlled vocabularies, terminologies, ontologies, corpora, multi-lingual resources
- Semi-automatic and/or collaborative methods for the update, evolution, extension or enrichment of resources
- Evaluation and comparison of tools and resources
- Adaptation of tools and resources to new sub-domains, text types or languages
- Interoperability of resources and standards
- Tools for the exploration of resources

IMPORTANT DATES

September 25th 2016 - Paper submission deadline
October 16th 2016 - Notification of acceptance
October 30th 2016 - Camera-ready papers due
December 12th 2016 - Workshop


SUBMISSIONS

The maximum submission length is 8 pages (A4), plus two extra pages for references.

Papers will be accepted in PDF format only, via the workshop's START submission site (https://www.softconf.com/coling2016/BioTxtM2016/)

Authors can indicate their preference for presentation mode (i.e. oral or poster presentation) in the submission form, and the reviewers will recommend an appropriate mode of presentation to the program committee which will then decide. There will be no distinction in the proceedings between research papers presented orally or as posters.

Papers must be submitted in English, anonymised with regard to the authors and/or their institution (no author-identifying information on the title page nor anywhere in the paper), including referencing style.
Authors should also ensure that identifying meta-information is removed from files submitted for review.

Papers must conform to official COLING 2016 style guidelines, which are available here: http://coling2016.anlp.jp/doc/coling2016.zip. This contains LaTeX files, a Microsoft Word template file, and a sample PDF file.


ORGANISATION

* Sophia Ananiadou, National Centre for Text Mining, University of Manchester UK
* Riza Batista-Navarro, National Centre for Text Mining, University of Manchester UK
* Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, Computational Bioscience Program, University of Colorado School of Medicine, USA
* Dina Demner-Fushman, National Library of Medicine, USA
* Paul Thompson, National Centre for Text Mining, University of Manchester, UK

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

* Eiji Aramaki, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan
* Hercules Dalianis, Stockholm University, Sweden
* Graciela Gonzalez, Arizona State University, USA
* Wen-Lian Hsu, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
* Rezarta Islamaj, NCBI/NLM/NIH, USA
* Roman Klinger, University of Stuttgart, Germany
* Robert Leaman NCBI/NLM/NIH, USA
* Shervin Malmasi, Harvard Medical School
* Makoto Miwa, Toyota Technological Institute, Japan
* Sung-Hyon Myaeng, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Korea
* Claire Nedellec, French National Institute of Agronomy (INRA), France
* Naoaki Okazaki, Tohoku University, Japan
* Arzucan Özgür, Bogazici University, Turkey
* Martha Palmer, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA
* Stelios Piperidis, Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Greece
* Guergana Savova, Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, USA
* Hagit Shatkay, University of Delaware, USA
* Mark Stevenson, University of Sheffield, UK
* Yoshimasa Tsuruoka, University of Tokyo, Japan
* Lucy Vanderwende, Microsoft, USA
* Karin Verspoor, University of Melbourne, Australia
* Stephen Wu, Oregon Health & Science University, USA
* Yan Xu, Microsoft Research Asia, China
* Pierre Zweigenbaum, Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur (LIMSI), France